Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Sampler

The
chapters on this site are genuine working drafts. All they have in common
is that they are unfinished. Some are very, very raw. Some are embarrassing
dead ends.

So, rather than only shoving a pile of scratched-out
foolscap in your face, I figured I’d cull some passages that seem to me
to be more or less finished. Of course, they may not be; there's no guarantee
these will make it into the final draft. Nevertheless, they should give
you a sense of what the book is about. NOTE:
Breaks indicate a discontinuity.

From
Chapter 1: A New World

The fact that Michael Ian Campbell used an online
alias raised no suspicions. Nor should it have. In fact, choosing a name
by which you’ll be known on the Web is a requirement for using America
Online. Known as “Soup81” to his AOL buddies, Campbell at 18 was considered
a polite, even kind young man in the Florida town where he lived with
his mother. At the end of 1999 he had finished his first semester at a
community college and was working in a retail store during the day, pursuing
his dream at night by acting in plays at the Cape Coral Cultural theatre.
On December 15, he and millions of others were using America Online’s
“instant messaging” facility to type messages back and forth to their
friends old and new. Instant messaging opens a window on your computer
where the letters being typed by your conversant show up as they're typed
- even the effect of the Delete key is eerily evident. It's like watching
over the shoulder of someone typing, although that person can be thousands
of miles away. Indeed, Soup81 was chatting with 16-year-old Erin Walton
in Colorado, someone he had never met before. He did know something about
her though: eight months earlier, a pair of teenagers had killed 13 people
at Walton’s high school, Columbine, in Littleton, Colorado.

After some initial chitchat, he typed a warning
onto Walton’s screen. Don’t go to school the next day, his message said,
because "I need to finish what begun (sic) and if you do [go to school]
I don't want your blood on my hands."

Walton, understandably shaken, alerted the Columbine
school officials who closed the school for two days, postponing exams.
Three days later, the FBI got a court order in Denver forcing AOL to reveal
the person behind the name “Soup81,” and they moved in quickly, questioning
Campbell for 90 minutes and taking custody of his computer. A judge ordered
Campbell to remain in the county jail without bail until his hearing a
few days later. [1]

His lawyer, Ellis Rubin, made up a type of insanity
– “Internet intoxication” – to excuse it. His mother blamed this aberrant
behavior on the death of Campbell’s father a month earlier. But Michael
Campbell expounded a different explanation. On The Today Show,
seemingly trying to puzzle out his own behavior, he said that he, as a
dedicated actor, was trying on a role. He was seeing what it would be
like to be his favorite actor, John Malkovich.

While “Internet intoxication” makes about as much
sense as the “Twinkie defense” – murderer Dan White’s supposed claim that
junk food threw off his moral sense
[2] – it at least acknowledges that something about the Internet
contributed to this event. At the very least, had Campbell met Walton
in person, his “channeling” of Malkovich would probably have come off
as nothing more than a celebrity impression. The Internet let Soup81 become
someone that Michael Ian Campbell isn’t. While Soup81’s actions on December
15, 1999 were certainly atypical of the tens of millions of chats held
everyday, it is not at all unusual on the Web for someone to “try on”
a personality and to switch personalities from chat room to chat room.
The consistency and sincerity we take so seriously off the Web are all
in play on the Web. Behavior that would cause your family to plot an intervention
off the Web are the norm on the Web. The very basics of what it means
to be a self – identity through time, an “inner” consistency, a core character
from which all else springs – are in question on the Web. [3]

Michael Campbell is, of course, an exception. That’s
why he got onto The Today Show while the other 300-400 million users of
the Web did not. And that’s why he served four months in a Florida jail
as part of a plea bargain that also forbade him from using the Internet
for three years. Fortunately, Campbell’s story is not typical. But, even
the ordinary world of the Web is more alien than it at first seems. Take
something as ordinary as buying something on eBay...

[Omitted: description of bidding on a quilt
at eBay.]

…
I didn’t win that auction. And although my interactions with eBay were
very simple, they are based on assumptions that are quite different from
my real world assumptions. …You could even classify them by using some
of the big concepts from the real world, such as space, time, self, and
knowledge.

Space:
eBay is a Web space that occupies no space.
Its “near” and “far” are determined by what’s linked to what, and the
links are based not on contiguity but on human interest. The geography
of the Web is as ephemeral as human interest: eBay pulled together a listings
page for me based on my interest in “handmade quilts,” while simultaneously
building pages for thousands of others who had other, unpredictable interests.
Each of us looked across the space that is eBay and saw a vastly different
landscape: mine of quilts, yours of Star Wars memorabilia, someone else’s
of battery chargers.

Time:
Earlier that morning, while waiting for my wife in our town
center, I ducked into a store called Ten Thousand Villages that sells
world crafts at a price fair to the artisans.
[4] For ten minutes I enjoyed browsing among the Chilean rainsticks
and the Djembe drums from Burkina Faso. Then I saw my wife through the
window, left, and closed the door behind me. My time with eBay was different.
As I investigated different auctions, placed a bid, and checked back every
few hours to see if I’d been outbid, I felt as if I were returning to
a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted. I could
break off in the middle when, for my example, my son came home, and go
back whenever I wanted. The Web is woven of hundreds of millions of threads
like this one. And, in every case, we get to determine when and how long
we will participate, based solely on what suits us. Time like that can
spoil you for the real world.

Self: Buyers and sellers on eBay adopt a name
by which they will be known. The eBay name of the woman selling the quilt
I was interested was "firewife30." Firewife30 is an identity,
a self, that lives only within eBay. If she's a ratfink bastard elsewhere
but always acts with honor in eBay transactions, the "elsewhere"
is not a part of Firewife30 that I can know about or should particularly
care about. The real world person behind firewife30 may even have other
eBay identities. Perhaps she's also SexyUndies who had 132 "sexy
items" for sale at eBay while firewife30 was auctioning her quilt.
Unlike real world selves, these selves are intermittent and, most important,
they are written. For all we know, firewife30 started out as firewife1
and it's taken her this many drafts to get to a self that feels right
to her.

Knowledge:
I entered my eBay search for quilts without much knowledge.
By browsing among the 248 quilts for sale, I got an education. Yes, I
could easily use the Web as a research tool, and at times during my quest
I ran down some information – “sashing” is a border around each quilt
block [5] , a good quilter will get 10-12 stiches per inch [6] – but I learned more and learned
faster by listening to the voices of the quilters on eBay. I got trained
in the features to look for, what the quilters consider to be boast-worthy,
and what the other bidders thought was worth plunking their money down
for. This was unsystematic and uncertified knowledge. But because it came
wrapped in a human voice, it was richer and, in some ways, more reliable:
the lively plurality of voices in some fields can and should outweigh
the stentorian voice of experts.

If a simple auction at eBay is based on new assumptions
about space, time, self and knowledge, the Web is more than a place for
disturbed teen-agers to try out roles and more than a good place to buy
cheap quilts.

The Web has sent a jolt through our culture for
better or worse, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative
works, and possibly even institutions such as religion and government.
Why? How do we explain the lightning charge of the Web? If it has fallen
short of our initial hopes and fears about its transformational powers,
why did it excite those hopes and fears in the first place? Why did this
technology hit our culture like a bolt from Zeus?

Suppose – just suppose – that the Web is a new
world we’re just beginning to inhabit. We’re like the earlier European
settlers in the United States, living on the edge of the forest. We don’t
know what’s there and we don’t know exactly what we need to do to find
out: do we pack mountain climbing gear, desert wear, canoes or all three?
Of course, while the settlers may not have known what the geography of
the New World was going to be, they at least knew that there was a geography.
The Web, on the other hand, has no geography, no landscape. It has no
distance. It has nothing natural in it. It has few rules of behavior and
fewer lines of authority. Common sense doesn’t hold there, and uncommon
sense hasn’t yet emerged. No wonder we’re having trouble figuring out
how to build businesses in this new land. We don’t yet even know how to
talk about a land that has no soil, no boundaries, no near or far.

New worlds create new people. This has always been
the case because how we live in our world is the same thing as who we
are. Are we charitable? Self-centered? Cheerful? Ambitious? Pessimistic?
Gregarious? Stoic? Forgiving? Each of these describes how we are engaged
with our world but each can also be expressed as the way our world appears
to us. If we’re egotistical, then the world appears to center around us.
If we’re gregarious then the world appears to be an invitation to be with
other people. If we’re ambitious then the world appears to be awaiting
our conquest. We can’t characterize ourselves without simultaneously drawing
a picture of how the world seems to us, and we can’t describe our world
without simultaneously describing the type of people we are. If we are
entering a new world, then we are also becoming new people….

You could look at these examples
as anomalies – a quiet teenager who gets on the Web and makes cruel threats,
scores of workers who get fired for saying in email only what they would
have said in person, a fringe candidate who’s blunt about his outrageous
views on the Web without any effect on his campaign. But just about everywhere
we turn, the Web upsets our expectations. Sharing copyrighted music files
seems perfectly proper to 70 million Napster users. Companies that compete
form cooperative net marketplaces. Pornography that once you had to go to
Sweden for now you can’t avoid. The best sources of information about products
are customers, not the companies creating the products. Children play ultra-violent
online games with the innocence of a game of tag. Hundreds of millions of
people are building a trans-national infrastructure without guidance, assistance
or permission. So many things don’t make sense on the Web that we’re suffering
from Anomaly Fatigue.

The real problem we face with
the Web is not understanding the anomalies, it’s facing how deeply weird
the ordinary is.

…consider the Web as a construction
project. It’s the most complex network ever created. It is by many orders
of magnitude the largest collection of human writings and works in history.
It is far more robust than networks far smaller. Yet it was created without
any managers. In fact, it only succeeded because its designers made the
conscious decision to build a network that would require no central control.
You don’t need anyone else’s permission to join in, to post whatever you
want, to read whatever others have posted. Posting an electronic version
of, say, Anna Karenina is far simpler than donating a copy to your
library: you can drag and drop the electronic version onto your Web site,
but if you try to donate it, you will fill out a form and a library committee
will put it through a process to decide whether it should be shelved or
sold, and each of those processes will cause its own small flurry of paperwork.
The Web is profoundly unmanaged and that is crucial to its success. As a
result, the Web is a mess. Unlike the real world, it does not consist of
a set of knowable and undeniable facts. Far from it. The Web is as organized
as an orgy. It literally consists of voices proclaiming whatever they think
is worth saying, trying on stances, experimenting with extremes, being wrong
in public, making fun of what they hold sacred in their day jobs, linking
themselves into permanent coalitions and ephemeral acknowledgements, savoring
the rush you feel when you realize you don’t have to be the way you’ve been

Suppose our common sense ideas about the core notions
of our culture – space, time, self, knowledge and more – have been out
of kilter for not just decades but for hundreds of years. Suppose our
basic ideas about what it means to be a human with other humans in a world
not of our making lead to a picture that not only misrepresents our situation
but paints our existence as a gloomy, broken, isolated – not to mention
nasty, brutish and short. Suppose our experience of the Web, precisely
because it is so different, gives the lie to our common sense and thus
returns us to a more authentic, more true even more hopeful understanding
of what it means to be a human sharing a world with other humans.

If that were the case then for all of the over-heated,
exaggerated, manic-depressive coverage of the Web, we’d have to conclude
that the Web in fact has not been hyped enough.

FromChapter 2: What’s the Web Made
of?

…We read frequently about the real world versus
the virtual world of the Web. Our travel agent casually talks about real
tickets versus electronic tickets. If we’re daydreaming, we’re told to
come back to reality. What do we mean by real in each of these cases?
Generally, the real thing is the one that has actual matter or atoms,
and isn’t merely a simulation or representation. So far so good. But here’s
the question: What is the “merely” doing in that sentence? Why does the
following sentence make sense to us: “The value of gold – which is really
just a drab, semi-rare mineral – is merely one that our culture happens
to bestow on it”? Why does it seem obvious that what we bring to the party
– our values, concepts, language itself – is mere while reality
gets to sit in the catbird seat?

Suppose the Web were to teach us – for reasons
we’ll see – that we’ve put too much unthinking emphasis on the real world
as opposed to the world as we experience it. The Web revolution isn’t
simply an “empowerment” of consumers. It overthrows the tyranny of reality
itself, allowing our way of thinking about our experience to be more in
line with how we actually experience the world.

So, just what is a bit? On a chilly spring day,
I met with John Tumas , an Operations Manager at Harvard’s network operations
center in Cambridge to see bits in action. He met me outside where a few
smokers were puffing cigarettes under the protection of an overhang which
was stopping only the least determined rain drops. We went up a flight
of stairs and entered a room with the sort of wall-size video display
we’ve learned to associate with war rooms. But rather than displaying
countries and missile silos, this one was showing a map of the network
of machines for which Tumas’ group is responsible. Even on the over-sized
display, it takes carefully-calculated plotting to keep the machine names
from overlapping one another.

Harvard’s machines handle lots of bits. In fact,
“lots” wildly understates the situation. Until a few years ago, a terabyte
was considered the monster number when it comes to storing data. If you
wanted to get a laugh, you made a joke about something you considered
bloated – the new version of Windows or the number of spam emails you
receive a day – needing a terabyte to store it. But now that the cheap-o
computers you buy at the local appliance store come with disk drives in
the double-digits of gigabytes, a terabyte no longer seems to be on the
other side of imaginable. After all, a terabyte is “just” 1024 gigabytes,
and with 100-gigabyte hard drives on their way as the norm, you and your
nine best friends will soon have a terabyte of storage sitting under your
collective desks. Nevertheless, a terabyte remains a lot of data, equivalent
to about a billion typed characters or about 500 million pages of text,
enough to fill 40,000 four-drawer filing cabinets.
[7] A terabyte is about the size of a million PowerPoint presentations,
[8] 250,000 stolen songs, or, if you prefer, ten million medium-resolution
photographs of Pamela Anderson.

Every day, Harvard University transfers 85 to a
hundred terabytes of information within its borders and another 3-5 terabytes
to the rest of the world.

Through a door in the Operations Center is the
machinery of the Internet, or at least Harvard’s contribution to it. John
began our tour by pointing to a computer mounted on a shelf in set of
joined cabinets with black glass doors. “That’s the Cisco 12000, the biggest
in its class,” he said, launching into an explanation that covered OC3,
OC48, ATMs, gigabit and the Hewlett-Packard 6509 before I could stop him.
As he unhinges the door to the neighboring cabinet to show me another
computer, I stood in front of this silent machine and tried to give myself
a sense of its role in the global network.

All over the world in air-conditioned rooms, specialized
computers like this one are moving bits. The rooms are well protected,
well lit, exceptionally clean, and oddly quiet. The front of the computers
display small lights but, disappointingly, they don’t flicker randomly
like the displays of computers in 1950 science fiction movies. The lights
only flickered in those movies because the computers of our imagination
worked so slowly, the time between bits perceptible to the human eye.
It would have taken a room-sized mainframe in those early days even to
imagine the power of the one we’re looking at now. Computers like the
Cisco 12000 are routers, dedicated to sending packets of information to
their next stop on the Internet. They have no monitors, no mice, no keyboards,
no hard drives. You can’t browse the Web with one of these boxes, and
you can’t even play solitaire. Yet, Cisco, managed to sell about 8 billion
dollars’ worth in a recent 12 months
[9] because routers do one thing magnificently: they stand in front
of a stream of bits and like a mad batsman swat them in the right direction
– 360 billion bits a second in a machine like the 12000.
[10]

Routers are the beating hearts of the Internet.
They are in intimate contact with the Net’s lifeblood, packets of bits.
Every page you download, every email you send, every MP3 music file you
share, every jerky video you view over the Web consists ultimately of
thousands and millions of bits. Every sound or sight that pops up in your
browser was torn apart at its source, packaged into predictable bundles
of bits, and reassembled at the other end.

But there’s a problem with bits. They don’t exist.
At least not in the usual sense.

… Because the Web is a written place, there is
nothing natural there. The words have been chosen on purpose and placed
carefully by a human being for some human purpose (including pages that
show us information automatically generated or retrieved by programs).
Consider two pages that are vastly apart in their content. At www.conspire.com
you’ll find fuel for your paranoid conspiracy theories, including a “restored”
version of Lee Harvey Oswald’s travel itinerary that shows us some travels
mainstream historians don’t know about. At Wyatt Wong’s Winona Ryder “shrine,”
[11] on the other hand, the few sentences of text
are largely obscured by hideous background photographs of Winona. Yet,
considered simply as written, these two pages have something important,
and quite simple, in common: despite their difference in content, both
pages are social acts, written with others in mind. We take that for granted
when we visit a site. We understand without having to think about it that
the site expresses a point of view. As is almost always the case with
so-called “self-expression,” these sites express not just the inner state
of a person but how the world looks to them. At its simplest level, we
understand that these sites were built because their authors care about
something enough to take the time to put it down in words; writings are
the social expression of passion.

… The characteristics of these two pages are precisely
– and not at all accidentally – the characteristics of the word-based
world of the Web.

…In this sense, the Web corrects computers. For
a generation we have modeled our idea of humanity on computers. We have
inputs, we process information, we output. “Garbage in, garbage out,”
we’ve said about the mistakes we’ve made, thereby confusing decisions
with calculations. We’ve even taken it for granted that our intelligence
reduces to a series of ons and offs and so if we could replicate those
bits in a machine, the machine would be conscious – as if a careful enough
description of a living body would itself be living. Although the Web
of course is built on computer technology, our experience on the Web refutes
the computer-based assumptions we’ve come to accept. The Web only exists
because people care enough to want to talk about something. And yell.
And laugh. And scream. And insult. And fool. And snipe. And embrace.

Passion is at the heart of the Web. That’s why
it exists. That’s why it appeals to us. It is a place of unabashed caring.
Sharing an interest is as fundamental an act of humanity as sharing bread.
No wonder the Web speaks deeply to us.

… But there is, I believe, something
more pulling us on to the Web. The defensiveness many of us feel about the
Web has a political edge to it. The Web is ours. Unlike the world
that was given to us and certainly unlike the ruggedly realistic view of
a real world that doesn’t care about us, the Web is thoroughly ours in the
same way that language is ours. It is of us. It is drenched in that
which makes us human: consciousness, sociality, meaning, intention, interest.
As with anything human, the nature of those intentions varies from the noble
to the base to the perverse. Sites range from the mundane and manipulative
... to the furthest extremes of excitable compassion. That’s what we humans
do. But now we’re doing it in a world that we're building for ourselves
out of the truly human "stuff" of language and passion.

FromChapter 3: The Web Place

…Every tyranny is based on the fact that some things
are nearer than others. The tyranny of governments has to do with the
assertion of rights over what is near. The tyranny of communities is rooted
in the fact that space makes it difficult for us to pick up and leave
a group of people with whom we’re in disagreement. Even the tyranny of
the self is based in the fact that we live in a town, for months or years,
tying us to a consistency of personality and behavior that swaddles us
ever more tightly.

Freed of space, government, business, community,
self, and history itself would feel the ground drop from underneath them.
That’s one reason we feel giddy on the Web, for the Web has no geography,
no distance. If flying, as transcendence, is a spiritual act, then the
Web’s introduction of space without geography must be counted as a milestone
in our species’ spiritual development.

The only mystery is how the Web – a collection
of electronic pages – can be spatial at all.

…Ches and Tim’s maps are world’s apart. Ches’s
is of the Internet, the global network that pre-dates and enables the
Web; Tim’s is of the Web. Ches is of hardware; Tim is of Web sites, which
ultimately are software. Ches’s clusters are based on their physical connections;
Tim’s clusters are based on guesses about similarity of topic. Ches’s
aims at showing relationships to help our understanding; Tim’s aims at
helping us navigate. And both these maps are very different from maps
of the earth. First, they are highly dependent on the author’s interests:
Ches and Tim could change their plotting algorithms and their “land masses”
would radically shift. Second, Tim’s sort of Web maps are unlike any maps
of the earth ever created since the Egyptians first asked what the world
might look like to a high-flying bird: clicking on Tim’s map takes you
to where you touched. That only happens on this planet in dreams involving
genies and lanterns.

Yet, the real mystery is this: Why does it make
any sense at all to create maps of a world that is so profoundly non-spatial?
Why does the Web – accessed through a computer that shows us a 2-D screen
of colored bits – seem so resolutely spatial when it’s not spatial at
all?

…the Web has created a weird amalgam of documents
and buildings. With normal paper documents, we read them, file them,
throw them out, or send them to someone else. We do not go to them.
We don’t visit them. But not Web documents. Web documents - pages - are
places on the Web. We go them as we might go to the Washington Monument
or to the old Endicott Building. They’re there, we’re here, and if we
want to see them, we’ve got to travel.

They’re there. With this phrase, space has
entered the picture.

The odd thing is that, of course, we’re not really
going any place, and we know it. When we click on a link, a message is
sent to the server that houses the page we want and a copy of the page
is transmitted to us. If there are lots of graphics or if the Net has
indigestion, it can take a long time. We sit there watching the “Waiting”
symbol in our browser and mutter under our breath. So, we do in some sense
know that we’re dealing with a copy being delivered - slowly - to our
computer. Yet the spatial sense persists.

There’s no pre-existing Web space
waiting to be filled by the pages that are the stuff of the Web. This point
sometimes gets missed in media discussions of mega mergers such as that
of America On Line and Time-Warner. The columnists get in a fluster, worried
that these new, giant entities will crowd out the smaller sites, the way
a Wal-Mart can drive out local businesses. But this assumes that the Web
has a finite amount of space and that location counts. No, let AOL-Time-Warner-MCI-UN
build the world’s largest site complete with everything from news to gambling.
So what? If it’s good, we’ll go. If not, well, it’s no harder to get to
www.mom-and-pop.com than to www.mega-site.com. Distance on the Web is measured
by links, so the way to make your site “close” to where your customers are
is to get lots of places to point to it. How? By being interesting or worthwhile.
That’s not how real space works where location location location outweighs
almost everything – precisely because navigating real space is such a pain.
While big companies have an advantage when it comes to location because
their fatter wallets can buy better positioning, big sites don’t have a
leg up on being interesting. In fact, often it’s quite the contrary.

Imagine you’re in a room full of information about
Broadway shows. There are theatre posters on the wall, some essays on
the shelves, and song lyrics on a table. There are also some doors. One
is labeled “The Life and Music of George Gershwin.” Sounds interesting,
so you press the door bell. Instantly, you find yourself in a new room
with artifacts relating to Gershwin. This room also has magic doors to
other rooms, but, oddly, none for the room you started in. Now, imagine
there are over a billion rooms and tens of billions of magic doors and
you’ve just described the World Wide Web – the rooms are Web pages and
the doors are hyperlinks.

This is a very weird city we’ve just imagined. The way these
doors work changes the way we build the city. No subways. No streets. No
scarcity of real estate to provide advantage to some. No limit to the number
of next door neighbors you can have. In fact, nearness loses its symmetry:
My Broadway show room may be near to (linked to) your Gershwin room, but
your Gershwin room need not be near my room. In fact, you may not even know
that I’ve brought my room near to yours by linking to it...

Most tellingly, in this
Web city there is no outside, no empty space that contains the whole and
arranges the parts. In fact, the Web is a public place completely devoid
of space.

Web space is built not around things with neat
edges but things that point beyond themselves. Links are all that holds
the Web together; without links, there is no Web. The top ten sites always
are dominated by sites like Yahoo that get their value from pointing away
from themselves. Web space is linked, dynamic, poorly-edged, explosive.

This is a problem for many businesses. Business
considers itself a hard-edged object, although it clearly is also almost
purely relational – without suppliers, customers and partners, and the
processes connecting them, there is no business. But, we insist on drawing
precise lines around some set of people, things and processes and saying
everything inside the lines is our business, and everything outside is
not. Ultimately, the lines determine what the business controls – and
what the business controls is determined by the lines.

Businesses in the Web space, however, are learning
to operate with a different model of business – one that sees lines as
constraints and hyperlinks as the way out of “the box.” For example, in
real world merchandising, you want people to stay in your store as long
as possible. You use the inconvenience of space to persuade people to
buy straight off of your shelves rather than schlep around to your competitors
to do some comparison shopping. You hope that if they have to walk down
the Gadgets aisle to get to the bananas, they may decide to buy the device
that lets you scramble your eggs without breaking the shell. Then, as
your store gets bigger, the inconvenience of space practically requires
you to put in a high-margin fast food court where people can rest their
distance-weary feet.

These real world tactics lead companies to think
about their Web sites in terms of “stickiness,” i.e., getting their visitors
to stick around as long as possible. That is, they want to replicate on
the Web the inconvenience of the real world where space is necessarily
sticky – it’s easier to shop where you are then to travel somewhere else.
Sites like Yahoo faced this issue early on, for customers at Yahoo were
only there to get someplace else fast. Yet Yahoo was making money by selling
users to advertisers: the more pages on Yahoo a visitor viewed, the more
Yahoo could charge its advertisers. So, Yahoo decided to become a portal
– a collection of sites that provide a wide range of services. (Notice
that this use of “portal” is the opposite of what the term actually means:
a real portal is something you pass through, whereas a Yahoo-style portal
is intended to keep you from passing through.) Yahoo, in effect, has created
a mall in which nearness is the result of ease of access: it’s easy to
find the merchandise you want and the links are right there.

Other companies have adopted a different strategy
to replicate online the inconvenience of real-world space. To make their
site sticky, they avoid links to anything except their own site. That
works fine for sites-of-last-resort offering a quick sale of goods at
commodity prices. But otherwise, fear of links – “hyperphobia”? – makes
a site feel like a dead end on the Web. By making the site into a hard-edged
object with no pointers beyond itself, the site makes manifest its self-interest
and self-absorption. “Here’s a place,” it says, “at which only we speak.
We’re so entranced with ourselves that we don’t acknowledge the rest of
the world or the fact that maybe you don’t find us quite as fascinating
as we do.” Ironically, of course, customers will find the site not sticky
but repellant and claustrophobic.

The real stickiness on the Web isn’t inconvenience
but interest. Remember that Web sites are amalgams of buildings and documents.
We traverse Web space by reading. The techniques of making written materials
interesting are well known and highly developed. In short: if you want
your site to be sticky, write interesting stuff.

The Web place is defined by interest the way the
real world is defined by the accidents of geography. Interest on the Web
is – like Web space itself – explosive, out-bound, digressive. The Web
space is the opposite of a container. If your store forgets that, we customers
will feel like fireflies being chased by a cruel child with a jar in his
hands.

So, is the Web spatial? Yes, that is the fact of
our experience of the Web. But if we think of Web space in terms of the
measured space of the real world – or as the even more abstract notion
of a universal grid work of uniform units – we’ll go hopelessly wrong.
In fact, the Web feels spatial because it is a linked assemblage of places
– meaningful, significant spots, each different.

... But on the Web we experience something we can
never experience in the real world: places without space.

FromChapter 4: Threaded Time

Here’s a way to drive your spouse nuts. As you’re
walking someplace that feels a little farther than it should, turn to
her (or him, if that’s your preference), and say, “We’re not even close
to getting there.” She replies that it’s really not so far. This is your
chance. You point at a telephone pole that’s 50 feet from you. “Close?”
you expostulate, “Why we’re not even at that telephone pole.” As she absorbs
this irrelevancy, immediately say, “We’re still not at that telephone
pole. In fact, we’re not even half way there. We’re still not even halfway
there. We’re still walking and we’re not even halfway to that telephone
pole.” Then, when you finally pass it – and it will seem like forever
if you’re executing this maneuver properly – pick another object and begin
again: “Ok, so we’re past that telephone pole. But we’re still not past
that mailbox. We’re not even half way to that mailbox…” Your spouse is
guaranteed to find this truly annoying. Best of all, your kids will pick
up on it in an instant, adding it to their arsenal of ways to irk their
parents.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a childish trick.
By splitting distances into halves, we’re repeating our culture’s thinking
about time that gets us into trouble. The fact is that time just doesn’t
bear much scrutiny. Everywhere we look, we run into paradoxes…

… The great advantage of email
isn’t its speed compared with postal mail; if it were, we could have stuck
with faxes. Rather, you can control when you participate; email threads
stretch themselves out. If you go to your local meatspace Motor Vehicles
Department to renew your license, you’ll wait on line until it’s your turn.
Cut in line and die. Leave the line because you want to have lunch and you’re
going to have to start all over when you get back. The line is supreme.
All hail the line. If, on the other hand, you are able to renew your license
online, you’ll click over to the Motor Vehicles page, click on the link
to “Renew,” and start to fill out the form. If you then decide to go have
lunch, or to go check the online stock prices, or to watch an episode at
www.nakednews.com, you can come back to the Motor Vehicles page precisely
where you left off. That’s what non-linear time is about. Because the Web
generally doesn’t require coordinating other people to a shared schedule
– even instant messaging primarily hooks you up with people who have chosen
to be available for conversation – we can do things when we want. We are
in control of our time on the Web, not the tick-tock that chases us like
the crocodile chases Captain Hook.

Are our attention spans decreasing
or is life getting more interesting?

The great stories of literature have always shown
us that interest is fractal. With a fractal shape, the closer you look,
the more detail is revealed, and the detail reflects the shape at the
higher level of magnification — a shape made up of the same shape made
up of the same shape, ad infinitum. Humans are like that. Our experience
of the world is interest-based all the way through. As you look at why
we do something, you see a view of the world shaped by what we care about.
As you look ever more closely, going to finer and finer details, you always
find not only that the view is shaped by our interests, but that those
interests reflect our larger interests — interests are fractal. In the
right hands, even the most minute dissections of human character and soul
show a person's largest aspirations and passions writ small. We have no
better example of this than James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the
most banal of humans is shown to lead a life that in its details deserves
to be described in the language of heroes — Leopold Bloom as Odysseus.

The shattered continuum of linear time is tied
together in deeply fractal ways. Stories sew time together by showing
us that the end was present in the beginning all along, and the whole
is revealed to have been present in the details. Obviously, the Web isn’t
just about stories. But by drawing topics into threads that have their
own persistence, they enable people to pursue their interests down to
the fractal details, unlike in a real-world conversation that can last
only so long as the participants have a continuous stretch of time to
devote to it. So, if we say that Web time returns control to us, we really
mean that it returns time to the control of our interests. But our interests
are not under our control. Time is returned to the passions we undergo,
the hooking of our attention by the words of the Web. These hooks are
social; our interest is snared by hooks set by others with similar passions,
obsessions and cravings. We are hooked by the interests of others. Fractal
mirrors reflecting and refracting.

This way of binding time is as old as our world,
as old as the first conversation that went deeper than “Please pass the
burning stick.” It is the ever-present structure of time and attention.
But the Web – free of the drag of space and free of a permission-based
social structure – unsticks our interests. We’re not stuck on a line in
the Motor Vehicles Department re-reading for the twelfth time the poster
trying to convince us not to run over children while we’re driving drunk.
We are instead searching, or seeking, or playing, or lolling, driven by
the interests that turn our head this way and that and that pump our passionate
hearts with its own tick-tocking drumbeat.

FromChapter 5: Perfection

The first definition of “hallmark” in most people’s
minds isn’t “A mark indicating quality or excellence” much less “A mark
used in England to stamp gold and silver articles that meet established
standards of purity.” [12] For most of us, “hallmark” means “The greeting card company.”
And, Hallmark’s Web site reflects the cursive, engraved formality that
we associate with their cards. Their selection of free electronic cards
is presented in clear columns, carefully arranged and easy to navigate.
Browsing among the illustrations of cute kittens, somber floral arrangements
and nouveau-style cartoon characters is like strolling down the card aisle
in a drug store looking at categories such as Sympathy, Birthday and Back
to School – rows and columns of packaged expressions for the predictable
occasions of human emotion.

Now, in the year 2000, jump over to Blue Mountain
Arts (www.bluemountain.com). The page was a wash of garish colors, flashing
animations, and cheesy graphics. Blue Mountain looked like a bunch of
amateurs put it together. And in a sense they did. The two founders, Steven
Schutz and Susan Polis had a link to a page showing them as they wanted
to be seen: a photo of them driving to Woodstock in 1969 in their “freedom
car” covered with peace symbols and slogans and a photo of them hand-printing
poetry posters in 1971. [13]
They’re hippies. In fact, if you zoomed in on their freedom car,
you saw it looks like their home page: the same colors, same broad-stroke
graphics, same ethos.

The Hallmark site is highly designed and highly
polished. Blue Mountain’s site looked thrown together and unprofessional.
Both provided about the same range of cards. Both were free services.
And for all Hallmark’s name recognition and branding, Blue Mountain was
far more popular. In fact, according to a study published in June, 2000,
Blue Mountain was the #4 site on the Web in terms of visitors, while Hallmark
was #38. [14] Blue Mountain
delivered about 40 million cards during the 2000 Valentine season.

Blue Mountain’s dominance in the e-card arena was
not despite the imperfection of its site. It was because of it.

… Business’s trafficking in the images of perfection
works its way down to the individual level in the adherence to the theology
of professionalism. There are lots of good things to say about professionals:
they meet their obligations and treat their clients in a business-like
fashion that is fair and respectful. But that’s only part of what makes
a person a professional. A professional gets to wear a white lab coat
and carry a clipboard, metaphorically if not literally. The lab coat is
the outward sign of membership in the priesthood. The clipboard is the
outward sign of the professional’s methodology; in the literal case of
a clipboard, the methodology is instantiated in forms that get filled
in appropriately. A methodology is a set of “best practices” that have
emerged over time, a standard way of analyzing and proceeding. Since every
service company claims to have “highly-trained professionals” – even the
Ku Klux Klan boasts on its home page that it’s “America’s Oldest, Largest
Most Professional White Rights Organization” [15] – having a methodology provides some further value and differentiation;
it implies that the company has done this type of thing over and over
and has it down to a science.

But business isn’t a science. It’s a social institution.
Over time, we have confused the measurement of the activity with the activity…

… consider one of the most common
Web activities: using a search engine to find a page. Suppose you’re looking
for trying to find how much steel India imports every year. You enter in
your query, guessing at the words that might be on the page you’re looking
for, perhaps “India,” “steel imports” and “annual.” The search engine displays
a page with what it has decided are the top ten most likely pages that contain
those words. It also tells you that there are over 17,000 pages that it
thinks might meet your criteria. None of the top ten is exactly right so
you have the search engine display the next ten. Let’s say #14 on the list
has the information you’re looking for. Success! And yet from another point
of view, this has been an embarrassing failure. If someone asked you a question
and you gave thirteen wrong answers before hitting on the right one, you
would not be filled with a warm sense of accomplishment. If the telephone
white pages had this error rate, you would never use them.

… Now we come back to the Web. Links don’t work.
Email messages are misspelled. Discussion boards devoted to medical matters
of life and death contain claims so false that they’d be funny if they
weren’t so dangerous. The site that downloaded in a second an hour ago
now takes 5 minutes. The link you thought would take you to pictures of
endangered species instead sinks you into a porno site that spawns new
windows like poison ivy sprouting leaves. Where’s perfection when we need
it?

The imperfection of the Web isn’t a temporary lapse.
It’s a design decision. ...The designers weighed perfection against growth
and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose.

So, if we say that the Web is self-organizing,
it’s crucial to recognize that that doesn’t imply that it’s very organized
at all. It is not, for example, as consistent, predictable or purposeful
as a protozoan. To say the Web is organic is to under-appreciate organisms.
It does tend to regulate itself if you count as self-regulation the abandoning
of a discussion that went so well that too many people joined it or the
introduction of filters to try to give us back a grip on email gone out
of control. The Web’s organization is only and precisely what individuals
on the Web want it to be. Some organizational structures are quite long-lasting,
such as the Web site that a big company has sunk millions of dollars into,
but many more structures last as long as two cars playing tag on a highway
– a quick exchange of emails, a mailing to 5 friends, a joke that sweeps
around the world in 8 hours and is forgotten, a link on a page that no
one notices and that breaks two days later.

Yet the Web works. … The Web works because it’s
broken.

… Companies talk in bizarre, stilted ways because
they believe that such language expresses their perfection: omniscient,
unflappable, precise, elevated and without accent or personality. This
rhetoric is as glossy, and as unbelievable, as the photos in the marketing
brochure. Such talk kills conversation. That’s why companies talk
that way.

FromChapter 6: Public Faces

The Public is where we are most faceless, most
distinct from the individuality that we treasure so highly and which seems
like the most real part of us.

And yet there is something basically human about
being a member of the public. Rabbits don’t have a public. Even dolphins
don’t. It is not like belonging to a bowling league or a political party.
Precisely because it isn’t optional – there’s no sign-up and no way to
resign – it expresses something important about us. Being public creatures
is part of being social creatures. Public and private are poles of our
existence.

This feels paradoxical. We are individuals, yet
as individuals we are necessarily part of a faceless mass. Usually it
doesn’t bother us. But there are times and ways in which the disjunction
between being an individual and being a member of the public – being private
and being public – confronts us. For example, to marketers, we are not
just particles with motive but also particles with money. Marketing for
a hundred years has been based right on the heart of the paradox. Marketers
want to affect you quite personally: they want you to give them the money
you’ve worked for and that you lay awake in bed worrying about. And they
want to change the behavior of the particles in their economic universe
by appealing to the most personal of motives: your desire to be admired,
to stay healthy, to breed with the most comely exemplars of our species.

But, the most efficient way of reaching potential
customers has been through broadcast media. So, just as the Industrial
Revolution drove down the cost of manufacturing by creating identical,
interchangeable products through interchangeable workers, the broadcast
revolution drove down the cost of marketing by inventing interchangeable
customers. Thus was the consumer created, a type of particle defined
by what it buys. A consumer dwells not in a flesh and blood world but
in a “demographic segment” which consists of a few salient characteristics:
18-24 urban males, 35-45 middle income stay-at-home moms, etc. The characteristics
defining the segment could, of course, make much less sense than this:
if people with “J” as a middle initial who sing in the shower respond
positively to sky-written ads urging them to buy beanies, they would become
the beanie industry’s hottest new demographic. As members of a segment,
we are nothing but a shared set of salient characteristics.

And yet…

…Facelessness is at the heart of our membership
in the real world public. When I refer to myself as a “member of the public,”
in the real world I’m stripping away all my differences and am thinking
about what I’m due simply because I am a co-occupant like everyone else.
The rich kids don’t get to cut into the line for the slide in the playground.
The differences don’t count among members of the public. But, on the Web
there is no public space except insofar as people have spoken and posted,
and what we write expresses us and the world as we see it. It’s only interesting
insofar as its different. We speak our mind. We make our jokes and flame
for the fun of it. We sound like ourselves. Unlike the real world public
space, our voices are not heard within the public space. Rather, our voices
constitute the public space.

The Web is putting faces back onto the faceless
crowd.

Everyone knows that Michael Jackson has sex with
kids, that Keanu Reeves is secretly married to David Geffin and that Jamie
Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite. The evidence? Little to none. So why do
these “facts” fall so easily from our lips when we’re much more circumspect
about the people around us? Easy: The Gloved One, Keanu and Jamie Lee
are famous. The gap between The Famous and us is unbridgeable. They are
so far removed from us ordinary folks that when we bump into a Famous
Person at an airport or on a city street, we feel that our realities are
colliding. “He sneezed, just like a normal person,” we say, surprised
that The Famous are human.

Fame is the counterpart of our culture’s mass public.
We are so faceless taken collectively that we assume that a person who
has retained her or his face while in front of the crowd must be quite
unlike the rest of us poor schlubs. The larger and more faceless we are
as a crowd, the more fame counts and the more extraordinary the famous
are.

Fame on the Web is different, and this tells us
something about the nature of the Web public…

The pointlessness of online mass politics is apparent
at www.e-thepeople.com where you can start up your own petition as easily
as tanking a dot-com ("210,033 electronic signatures on 4,522 petitions
" [16] ). Here you'll
find petitions on topics ranging from decriminalizing marijuana, to recalling
our ambassador to Vietnam to protest human rights abuses, to banning amalgam
dental fillings, to "We, the undersigned ... hereby declare the Governor
[Bush] to be a big smirky doofus." Even the more serious petitions
have accomplished nothing beyond giving the signatories a warm sense of
pride for “getting involved” and “doing something.” The same factor explains
both the frivolousness of so many of the online petitions and the impotence
of the serious ones: it’s too darn easy.

Nevertheless, the predictions that the Web will
change the nature of government are likely true, but not because it wires
the masses and not even because it makes it harder to keep secrets from
the citizenry. The biggest change in our way of governing is likely to
come from the way the Web public is changing the nature of the private…

…It is literally like being a kid again. We can
try on clothing and pretend without worrying that we’re being undignified
or giving people “the wrong idea.” The self can be what it’s always been:
a play of habits and creativity, responsive to the people around us. We
just don’t have to keep up appearances because there is no private self
– and not even a consistent public self – that needs the maintenance.
More exactly, there is a private self, but it’s sitting on its butt in
the real world. The anonymity of the Web means that tracing your Web ravings
back to your physical self is beyond the capabilities of most of the people
you meet on line, although there are always concerns that nosy governments
and unscrupulous businesses may know more about the relation of your online
and real world selves than you’d like.

On the Web, you become many small selves loosely
joined.

More later…

[2] According to the Urban Legends Reference Page,
the Twinkie Defense was never actually offered. Instead, an expert witness
testified that White’s abandoning of his usual health food regime was evidence
of White’s deep depression. The witness did not claim that eating junk food
caused the depression. Barbara and David Mikkelson, 1999. http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/fracture/twinkie.htm

[3] Sherry Turkle has written two superb and prescient
books on this topic: The Second Self and Life on the Screen.